“We are on a political prudence but not a medical rationale”

French hospitals continue to receive more and more people hospitalized with Covid-19, but critical care services are following the opposite trend, according to figures published by health authorities. On the other hand, the number of positive cases identified each day in France exceeds 400,000. Invited to Europe Matin on Thursday, emergency doctor Gérald Kierzek estimated that “the more we look, the more we find” and that this indicator is not the right one to judge the evolution of the epidemic.

stop panicking people

“When we seek, we find. The more you test, the more you find. If during the first wave and second wave, which were waves of hospital saturation, we had tests and we had tested, maybe the we would have had the same figures. So the more we find, the more we panic and it has a real negative effect of panicking people, the media and politicians. Whereas it would be desirable to put things into perspective”, he judged. “Just because you’re positive doesn’t mean you’re sick. […] So let’s stop freaking people out.”

For the doctor, the number of positive cases is indeed meaningless. “First we counted the dead, then we counted the resuscitations, then the hospitalizations and now we count the cases. The only relevant indicator are the sick people and not at all the positive people. And there when we look at the critical care there are less than 4,000 patients,” he said. “When you are in the middle of an epidemic wave, it no longer makes sense to test because you can no longer trace the cases.”

“Political caution”

According to him, it has been weeks since the health restrictions could have been lifted. “In terms of health, it has been weeks since we could have said to ourselves that we should not restrict and constrain people because we had the examples of South Africa, the United Kingdom or Denmark and we have understood that Omicron was more contagious but less severe, especially since the hospital indicators do not move”, raised the doctor before continuing. “I understand the government’s caution but it is political caution, even a political calculation, and not in any case a medical rationale since we now know scientifically that Omicron does not lead to the hospital or very little.”